Did you hear the story about how I *almost* got us thrown out of church?
Way back before our trip to Yuma, we were sitting there innocently enough, watching a short presentation about the Angel Tree program by prison ministries. The video was actually about the children of those who are incarcerated and was telling what it is like to have a parent who isn't around and how hard it is for the kids, especially at Christmas time. It also talked about the extra burden it puts on the parent that remains. In my head I was thinking about how alike our situation is to these kids, with Jeremy being deployed, when the big crescendo to the video came up, they showed this adorable little big brown eyed Hispanic boy looking sad and then as he drew his face up, he pulled up a present and his sad face turned into a huge beaming smile.
I can't find the actual video, but this is a very similar one:
Well, I don't know what happened other than a heart wrenching video colliding with some kind of hormonal surge, but when those big brown eyes turned into a happy smile, I lost it. I had one of those uber emotional "I'm going to cry REAL HARD RIGHT NOW" sobs catch very loudly in the back of my throat. I was just mortified which made me start to snicker while I'm trying to hide the fact that I'm bawling and wiping tears from my eyes. Sweet Amelia looks up at me and says "It's ok. It almost made me cry too." All while wearing this half Hitler/half Fu Manchu pencil smudge mustache on her beautiful little face.
That was all it took.
Abby and I couldn't contain ourselves.
I'm sure to the rest of the church, it looked like we thought that kids who had crappy holidays because they had incarcerated parents was HILARIOUS!
Now we're back from Yuma and it's the day of the party. People have purchased gifts for the children. A potluck dinner has been planned. After lunch, the church kids (and a few adults) sat down to decorate cookies that were to be served that evening.
Amelia loves to decorate cookies, so she was happy to help!
Abby, the artist, came up with all kinds of cute cookies.
Marshall decorated 2 cookies. One for the party and one for himself.
He's more of a cookie eater than decorator!
The finished product!
The party that evening was nice. The church had planned a few skits and songs that our kids performed. Hopefully the kids that it was done for know that there are people who care about them and most importantly that they heard that God loves them and will use others to meet their needs.
No comments:
Post a Comment